Original author: Severin
TL;DR
Fren Pets pet can actually be understood as a mining machine, which continuously mines a portion of the expenditures of all players in the field as revenue.
Compared with friedn.tech, Fren Pet has made more designs in terms of product vitality and user retention. However, Fren Pet’s wealth creation effect is significantly weaker than friedn.tech and may become a hidden danger for user growth.
Base and Fren Pet achieve mutual success, and it is expected that more FrenX will become popular on Base in the future.
On November 17, Base’s official tweet about Fren Pet quickly detonated the community, and people flocked to this on-chain electronic pet game. A wealth effect myth surrounding the electronic pet game has also quietly begun.
Introduction to core gameplay
In Fren Pet, players first need to spend 100 $FP to Mint electronic pets. Subsequently, players need to spend $FP in the store to purchase various foods to reset the pets death time, avoid pet death, and increase pet points. Each pet can get a chance to spin the roulette wheel for free once a day, with a chance to get points, shields, insurance and other props. Each pet can also harass other pets every 15 minutes, and has a 40% probability of defeating other pets and obtaining their 0.5% point bonus. In addition, players can also join the dice game between players to gain higher points with greater risks. Finally, the pets points will determine the distribution of the ETH reward pool. If the player chooses to receive the reward, the pets points will be cleared and the game will end.
Fomo design by Fren Pet
No matter in terms of gameplay, UI design, player interaction experience and server quality, Fren Pet is not a high-quality game, and can even be said to be a shoddy game. After Bases official tweet was forwarded, Fren Pet even caused the server to be overloaded due to excessive traffic, causing the game to be interrupted. At this stage, Fren Pet relies more on its Fomo gameplay design to attract new players.
Gameplay:
Not Free to Play but better than Free to Play: The prerequisite for playing Fren Pet is that players need to spend 100 $FP to Mint an electronic pet. However, every time a new player enters and Mints a pet, Fren Pet will refund the 100 $FP Mint cost paid by the previous player. From a currency standard perspective, this is equivalent to Free to Play. But from a U-based perspective, as long as there are continuous players entering and spending in the game, the price of $FP will be expected to rise, and players will benefit from Mint behavior, which is equivalent to Give to Play. This will increase players willingness to participate, stimulate old players to mint more pets, and encourage new players to actively enter the game. (Now it has been modified to Mint. A pet only costs 10 $FP, and the $FP spent will be entered into the multi-money contract and distributed to long-term active players to encourage users to retain)
Guide players to consume more frequently to expand economic benefits: food has two attributes: survival time and point income. Generally speaking, the more expensive the food, the higher the points gain, but the shorter the survival time. This requires players to make a trade-off between survival time and point gains. Moreover, points will be linked to player earnings. Therefore, if Fren Pet players want to get as much ETH rewards as possible, they need to buy relatively expensive food with high point gains. But at the same time, the survival time of this type of food will be relatively short. This causes players who want to earn high profits to frequently purchase relatively expensive food, contributing a large amount of turnover to the game. In this process, the players investment costs will also become higher and higher, forcing players to continue to purchase food to avoid cost losses caused by the death of their pets. The design of a food survival time of up to 2-3 days will also increase the interaction between users and the game and increase user stickiness.
Give users low-cost future revenue expectations and encourage positive social diffusion: each pet has a chance to spin the roulette lottery once a day, with rewards ranging from 1 point to 2,000 points, and may also receive special rewards such as shields, or Nothing was drawn. The free spin gives users low-cost future profit expectations, and takes advantage of players love for lottery draws, motivating players to continue participating in the game and increasing the frequency of interaction between users and the game. Moreover, free spins will also encourage positive social diffusion among users. When users draw high rewards, they will tend to post and share them on social media, which will also bring more new traffic to Fren Pet.
Utilize the users gambling ability to enrich the gameplay and increase user stickiness: each pet can harass other pets every 15 minutes, and has a 40% probability of stealing a house to obtain rewards. The winner will receive 0.5% of the losers points. This mechanism will encourage gambling players to continuously launch attacks and gain points rewards from other players. At the same time, more rational players will also choose to increase their pet points, and through passive defense, they can passively gain the points of the challengers failure with a higher winning rate. In addition, Fren Pet has also introduced a more gambling dice game, where players can win rewards of up to 500 $FP with a paid ticket of 100 $FP.
After receiving the reward, the points will be reset to zero, and mining and selling will be blocked: What the Ponzi model fears most is that the first entrants will exit the game too quickly. Once the Fren Pet player chooses to receive the reward, the pets points will be cleared directly. This mechanism will allow players who want to obtain lasting benefits to receive rewards as late as possible, thereby allowing players to continue to stay in the game, and to a certain extent, it will also block the damage caused to the game economy by players mining and selling.
Token economy:
Invite rebates to encourage players to promote themselves: Similar to exchange rebates, 10% of the $FP used by players in the game will be automatically sent to recommenders, which will encourage players to actively promote and share their Fren Pet invitation codes, and start anew Players gain a continuous source of income from their consumption.
Token destruction creates expectations of future deflation: The total supply of $FP is fixed and 90% of the tokens used by players in the game will be directly destroyed. This will create expectations of token deflation and encourage players to hold and buy $FP earlier. FP token.
Token rewards return to players to create future revenue expectations: Every time a user buys or sells $FP tokens on BaseSwap, they must pay a 5% tax. When the smart contract accumulates 1,000 $FP tokens from taxes, they will automatically be converted into ETH and 2% of them will be distributed proportionally to leaderboard players, 2% to developers, and the other 1% as $FP Liquidity pool replenishment. The 2% reward return will serve as players’ future revenue expectations, motivating players to continue to participate in the game.
Fomos game mechanics and token economic design have attracted more and more players to Fren Pet. However, this game is not expected to last, because the driving force for players to pay to play does not come from the playability of the game, but from the players expectations of future earnings. The pet of **Fren Pet can actually be understood as a mining machine, which continuously mines a part of the expenditures of all players in the field as revenue. **When the players expected revenue decreases, rational players will begin to flee Fren Pet, causing the game to enter a vicious cycle of player loss, $FP buying and selling activities, reduced return rewards, expected revenue decline, and further player loss. If there is no way to attract players to continue paying through the games playability, or to introduce positive external economic benefits, then Fren Pet will not escape the ending of a hasty ending.
Compare Friend.tech
Fren Pet and friend.tech have many similarities, even their names are the same. Fren Pet and friend.tech essentially rely on users expectations of future revenue, and guide players to self-promote through social fission, causing community FOMO and driving a large number of new players to enter. Players who enter the game early can relatively gain lower costs in the early stage to obtain higher future profits as new players enter the game, thereby attracting users to retain.
The difference is that Fren Pets game-based scenario has more unique small designs to improve product vitality and user retention. For example, the pet feeding mechanism will guide users to continue consumption and bring long-lasting revenue to the application. Roulette draws and pet attacks that can be launched every 15 minutes will guide users to interact more frequently and enhance users willingness to retain. The design that will cause points to be cleared when receiving rewards can also delay early players from quitting prematurely.
However, Fren Pet’s pet raising model also limits the wealth creation effect of Fren Pet to a certain extent. different fromfriend.techThe Bonding Curve can reflect huge price increases and decreases through simple buying and selling of Keys. Fren Pet points increase, and reward stacking takes time to accumulate. Therefore, it is difficult for users to accumulate large wealth gains in a short period of time. This may also lead to Fren Pets narrative being not sexy enough and not attractive enough to users, which may become a hidden danger for Fren Pets growth. Therefore, we predict that Fren Pet will not quickly attract a large number of users through the exaggerated wealth effect in the early stages like friend.tech, nor will it cause premature loss of users and collapse due to a design similar to Bonding Curve. Fren Pet is more likely to remain tepid for long periods of time
Base needs more Fren Pets
Fren Pet’s popularity is of course also inseparable from Base’s retweets. In fact, Base and Fren Pet complement each other. Fren Pet needs Base to gain greater traffic exposure and arouse users FOMO psychology. Base also needs more Fren Pets to bring more funds, traffic, real users and income to the Base chain.
Fren Pet is similar to friend.tech. In gaming and social scenarios, Fren Pet relies on users’ expectations of future earnings to guide users to conduct high-frequency interactions and buying and selling operations. This will bring Base a more prosperous on-chain user ecosystem and accelerate the expansion of on-chain Gas revenue. At its peak, friend.tech single-handedly contributed to nearly half of the daily gas expenditures on the Base chain. Compared with friend.tech, which only buys and sells Keys, Fren Pet has more high-frequency interactive scenes in the game such as feeding and Bonk. While users operate frequently, they also pay more Gas fees as the real income of Base. .
As L2s become increasingly homogeneous, Base captures a large amount of active user traffic by diverting traffic to popular applications, and has embarked on a development path that is different from other L2s. It is expected that more FrenX applications with fomo attributes and high-frequency interaction scenarios will emerge on Base in the future, continuing to bring fresh blood to the Base ecosystem. FrenX may not necessarily bring huge wealth effects to users, but Base is indeed the winner behind the real money.
Reference：
https://docs.frenpet.xyz/category/overview
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/47536
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_14596.html
MT Capital
MT Capital, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is a crypto-native fund focusing on Web3 and related technologies. We have a global team, and our diverse cultural backgrounds and perspectives allow us to have an in-depth understanding of the global market and to seize investment opportunities in different regions. MT Capitals vision is to become the worlds leading blockchain investment firm, focused on supporting early-stage technology companies that can generate significant value. Since 2016, our investment portfolio covers Infra, L1/L2, DeFi, NFT, GameFi and other fields. We are not just investors, we are the driving force behind the founding team.
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